Okay, so the other day I was watching the game, and things got a little confusing. The refs called something called an “administrative timeout,” and I was like, “Huh? What’s that?” I’d never really heard of it before, or at least, I didn’t remember it. So, I decided to do some digging.
My Little Investigation
First, I grabbed my phone and started Googling. I typed in “administrative timeout NFL” and started scrolling through the results. I skipped past anything too complicated – I wanted the simple explanation, you know?
I skimmed a few articles and forum posts. Seemed like nobody could agree on what it really was. Someone saying it was injury related and someone saying it was just an extra timeout the refs could use whenever. So after getting fustrated I jumped into the rule book.I opened up the official NFL rulebook online. I looked up the terminology.
Putting It All Together
Okay, so, after all that, here’s what I figured out. From what I can read, this type of timeouts are used when there are unusual delays that stop the game. That can be a lot of things but I think I have a list that can some it up:
- After a player injury: it is used to give everyone time to check on the player and get them off the field safely.
- Messed up equiptment: it is called when something goes wrong with the equipment, like the play clock or a headset.
- Instant Replay issues: It can be used when something goes wrong with replay.
The main thing to rememeber is that is does not count againt the team’s normal timeouts, it does take away from game time as it still stops the clock.
